Way of an transaction

Question

I'm wondering how transactions are handled at Bitcoin/Ethereum/... . Miners send their found blocks to a fixed number of other miners who will redistribute them if they don't already have another version of this block. My question now is how transactions are handled. A transaction is sent to a miner who tries to mine it into a block. Does the miner also distribute the transaction in the network so that other miners can also try to mine this transaction, or does only the miner know about the transaction where the transaction was started inital?

Answer 1

Miners send their found blocks to a fixed number of other miners who will redistribute them if they don't already have another version of this block.

If a miner already has a block of a given number (X), and receives another block of the same number but with different contents (X'), they will keep whichever block has the highest difficulty. (Or specifically, whichever of the two blocks results in a chain of highest total difficulty.)

What is the exact "longest chain" rule implemented in the Ethereum "Homestead" protocol?

My question now is how transactions are handled. A transaction is sent to a miner who tries to mine it into a block.

Transactions are sent to the whole network, rather than just to a specific miner. (But yes, I think you're just saying: "A miner gets a transaction, which it tries to mine... ".)

Does the miner also distribute the transaction in the network so that other miners can also try to mine this transaction, or does only the miner know about the transaction where the transaction was started inital?

When you create and broadcast a transaction, it automatically gets sent to all nodes in the network and placed in their transaction pools. All nodes pass on transactions to neighbours as they receive them. So yes, a miner will pass on anything it receives to its peers*.

*Or it should, if it's using a vanilla client. Whether or not there are miners running their own code which doesn't distribute transactions to peers is another question.